Brave -- Pixar's 2012 release

xpost A lot of the so-called Disney princesses or whatever aren't princesses ... until they marry a prince. Belle, Cinderella, Snow White, Mulan Tiana in "Frog," not princesses. Jasmine is a princess. Sleeping Beauty is a princess. So is ... Pocahontas, I guess. And Ariel. And I guess Rapunzel. Anyway, that's a pretty fair princess rate.

I'd be curious to see how this turns out btw - so many of the best pixar movies are very unconventional stories told in ways that really take advantage of the computer animation medium. in short, films that would never, ever work as live action films. this one it seems could probably be made as a live-action for 1/10 the cost.

i was going to post about this in the dark & gritty snow white thread, two upcoming movies AND the new "once upon a time" show portray snow white as this wood-dwelling badass with weapons. now, i have faith in pixar to do this well, but everyone else needs to starting mixing it up a little imo

I'd be curious to see how this turns out btw - so many of the best pixar movies are very unconventional stories told in ways that really take advantage of the computer animation medium. in short, films that would never, ever work as live action films. this one it seems could probably be made as a live-action for 1/10 the cost.

Thus far I've thought "The Incredibles" was the only Pixar movie that could be made live action with really barely any changes. That was my only disappointment with that one.

yeah tbh i am not even really a pixar fan (though i like the ones everyone likes), and i have cranky indefensible old man beef over cg pretty much deading cel animation and yadda yadda, but i would actually prefer to see a lot of these cgi sfx spectaculars be totally animated in a pixar style.

getting a very vague "pixar's miyazaki fandom comes to the fore with this one" vibe off this trailer, but maybe that's just because of a.) the landscape shots and b.) the fact that it looks like more of a traditional adventure flick with a plucky heroine.

Between Shrek and every other Mike Myers endeavor, kind of Scottish accented out (sorry, Scots!). But this looks great and I can't wait to bring my daughters, even though I have a hunch the trailers gives everything away (monster is the bear, bear has cubs, bear not so bad after all, we all learn something).

Aside from the texture, the characters, and that hair, the thing you'll be talking about most when you leave the theater? La Luna, the short film that will play before Brave. We did see a final cut of La Luna, and nothing has ever made me feel so profoundly that I was watching an Italo Calvino story brought to life. I can't wait to see it again in June.

Pixar does not have a great track record with female characters, and then they pull the female director on the project (who came up with the concept) under suspicious circumstances. And I'm sure they'll be promoting it will a lot of blah blah blah female empowerment when they don't practice what they preach.

So far, so good, if nothing particularly original: It's a standard story about a tomboy princess who lusts for a quest of her own, a striving for freedom and independence, with some Stonehenge-type structures thrown in to give the movie some mystical resonance. You're fully expecting a full-throated action adventure in the second half of the movie, as Merida fights like her father while learning that her mother has a few lessons to teach as well.

That is not what happens. I am hesitant to give away the movie's big plot twist halfway through, but suffice it to say, when it happens, it's a needle-off-the-record moment that sends the movie careening off in an entirely different, much dumber direction. It signals that the movie is about to go silly on us, and not in a "Look, I'm Woody, howdy howdy howdy" fun silly direction. The mystery and potential scope of the first half is just sent flying off the back of the truck, and the movie becomes an odd mix of slapstick and fairy-tale flimsiness, an utterly conventional tale of derring-do that keeps bumping into the lane of the faintly ridiculous. The movie's second half is a weirdly aimless slog, as if it forget all the threads it set up in the first half. If I didn't know it was animated, I'd have thought they had to bring all the cast together for some last-minute emergency reshoots.